If you were asked to paint a verbal picture of the Internet in just five words, would they be porn, drugs, spam, Twitter and zombies? After analyzing an amazing two billion emails a day for three months, that's the image arrived at by one research outfit.
The latest
Internet Threat report from Commtouch, released today, contains little in the way of surprise: unless those five words have been off your security risk radar that is.
Based upon the analysis of more than two billion email messages every day, and apparently that is the correct figure, as well as the GlobalView URL database within the company's cloud-based network the Commtouch report is nothing if not extensive in reach. As far as the quarter two report that has been published today is concerned, the real story is the ever increasing use of blended attacks by the cybercriminal fraternity. Combining general messaging with Web-based and social engineering elements the bad guys hope to increase their success rates.
They tend to use email, or search engines for that matter, to lure their victims onto mainly genuine but compromised websites which are being covertly used to host spam advertising, malware, or phishing scams. I say covertly, as the honest owners of the majority of these compromised sites have absolutely no idea that they are being used for these nefarious purposes. Of course, the sad fact of the matter is they also have no idea about IT security either or their websites would not have been so compromised in the first place.
"Cybercriminals have been forced to change their techniques to evade improved detection technology," said Asaf Greiner, Commtouch vice president, products. "Complex multi-stage attacks with improved social engineering are proving to be the preferred technique."
The highlights, or perhaps I should say lowlights to be more accurate, of the report include:
Porn
Despite some recent reports to the contrary suggesting that
porn sites aren't that dangerous after all, according to the Commtouch analysis porn remains the single most 'infected with malware' website category.
Drugs
Pharmacy spam retained the top spot amongst cybercriminals, representing some 64% of all spam.
Spam
At the start of May spam, as a volume of all email traffic throughput, was 71% and this rose to 92% by the end of June. The quarterly average being a whopping big 82%. Still, that's good news in a way as the numbers are down on the quarter one report.
Twitter
While both Gmail and Yahoo! managed to hold on to their top spots as being hotspots for spoofed domains used in phishing email distribution schemes, Twitter has now also entered the top six. The Twitter domain being used, for example, in a very widespread email campaign constructed so as to lure innocent users onto a fake password reset page that was hosting malware.
Zombies
When it came to zombie activity, this was up over the prior quarter with an average of 307,000 zombies being activated daily to inflict malicious activity. India now has the most zombies in the world with 13% of the global total.
